Reading Infinite Jest

Ahight. I'm going to tackle it. My random thoughts here will probably not be incisive or enlightening, but feel free to join the read and chime in.

Oh, and on page 5 I felt the need to google "Kekulean knot" and came across the Definitive Jest blog. Told me what I wanted to know. Plus, I like the author's SNOOT score for each entry.

Since I came up with another DFW vocabulary blog when I looked up magiscule, I think I'll keep a running list.

Blogs Devoted to David Foster Wallace

Definitive Jest
A Linguistic Bestiary of David Foster Wallace
The Howling Fantods
David Foster Wallace Wiki

Before I get too far into Infinite Jest I need to decide how to do this. Because, doncha know, with my recent track record of not being able to concentrate (damn you, life, money, business problems) I'll otherwise probably get completely bogged down.

So, paging forward a bit the book seems to be--at least, in the first bit--divided into short sections. To start, I'll tackle each one individually in an entry.

"Year of Glad"

Oh, the word associations! Sad. Unconnected. Alienated. Uncomfortable. Kinda funny. Acutely observant. Painfully observant.

Our boy Hal is obviously on the spectrum, say my keen diagnostic skills. {ETA, fifty pages on: Huh. Maybe not? (Guess this is one of the hazards of reading a beloved, oft-studied work in a semi-public forum.)} Is he us? I certainly feel utterly self-conscious and uncertain of how I appear to others in social situations. Is my smile really a grimace? Are those actually words strung together into sentences coming out of my mouth, or could they be construed as animal grunts?

DFW's galloping, vocabulary-drunk prose reminds me--in the best of ways--of Pynchon: "The room's carbonated silence is now hostile;" "basins supported by rickety alphabets of exposed plumbing;" "I once saw the word KNIFE finger-written on the steamed mirror of a nonpublic bathroom."

Excuse me while I read on.

"Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment"

Huh.

Addictions of various sorts, of course--drugs, media. Paralysis of indecision.

More glorious prose. I noticed that in the first part he holds his hands so his fingers form an X and in this one he waits in "uneven X of light through two different windows." Probably just a coincidence, but you rarely see a writer use "X" even once, let alone twice in two chapters. (Yeah--that's my big insight here.)

"1 April--Year of the Tuck's Medicated Pad"

GOOD GRIEF--IT'S DADDY!

Okay, this obviously isn't going to work, because these sections are too short. More later.

You'll probably want 2 bookmarks, one for the main story and one for the notes. At least, I did.

Enjoy!

Oh yeah. Already on that. Thanks!

This is going to be an agonizingly good time, Becky.

Your first impressions of "Year of Glad" mirrored mine. Rather than blather & blather & risk spoiling the surprises and insights awaiting you, those aha moments you'll get best when you've wrestled this Sumosized Jest by yourself down to the sweaty mat, I'm just gonna sit back and kick my feet up, sip my scotch whiskey slowly, and be as encouraging an Infinite Jest reading companion as possible.

Yay! So exciting! Hi Becky and everyone, Enrique invited me. Infinite Jest and I are buds and it totally saved my ass this one time, and I feel like I owe it the reread. No idea what kind of timeline that'll unfold on yet, but I hope you'll not mind my popping in!

Becky - Slow down already. I barely bought the book! And someone ate my homework. I think it was the freeq

You guys, this is exciting!

For those of you who've read it already--as far as I'm concerned, spoilers are okay. I've never found them to diminish in any way my understanding of a work. Just try to be kind if I've totally gotten something wrong and you feel compelled to correct me.

For those who haven't read already: yay us! Finally reading what everybody else already knows to be a masterwork.

Feel free to start your own threads if you like, or just post here. It's all good. My onliest rule is: Be Kind. I've been intimidated/pissed off/gotten my feelings hurt by some of the snobbish meanness I've seen exhibited in some of the literary groups, and really don't want to experience that here.

Random Thoughts
3 August 2015

--Narrator's frequent insertion of "like" so reminds me of Pynchon's narrator's stutter in Gravity's Rainbow. Just sayin.

--I wish the endnotes were footnotes. 'T would be so much easier. Y'know, like popping an entertainment cartridge into the TP.

--I'm always impressed by great vocabulary masterfully used. I gotta ask, though: Did DFW already know words like "bolection," "apocope," and "magiscule," or did he have need of just such a word and search until he found it? Not that it matters in the least, just--wow. It's astonishing to me to have to look up so many words in a single work (and I'm only 63 pages in).

--Sleep is a terrifying thing in IJ, huh?

--Oh--Subsidized Time. I get it.

I wish the endnotes were footnotes

Yup.

And yeah, Gravity's Rainbow came up again and again, for me. I guess it's too much to hope that Pynchon and Wallace ever met.

Random Thoughts (to be edited as the day's reading progresses)
4 August 2015

--I couldn't do it. I just couldn't get through the endless endnote enumerating James O. Incandenza's filmography. I just couldn't.

--Looked up circumoral and the Wiktionary definition cited another use of the word by DFW.

--"The trees' bony fingers make spell-casting gestures in the wind as they pass." (p.86)

--Okay. I see that I'm not going to be able to help the comparisons. I had a frisson of recognition when I read the line, "His shadow did not yet reach the downtown regions of the city Tucson; not yet quite." (p.88) Then, two paragraphs later, the payoff: Goethe's Brockengespenst. Slothrop and, um, shit, I don't have my copy of GR here, but, like, you remember. One of those simultaneously luminously beautiful and ridiculous scenes which Pynchon does so sublimely. This one ain't bad either.

--Everything about this novel gets my spidey-sense tingling. 90 pp in and I just noticed that he uses single quotation marks, which is non-standard in American novels. For a reason? Just a quirk? STFU, Becky, and keep reading?

nooooo that's my favourite endnote! though it is too large to work as a footnote, and that is a flaw

Okay. I'll pop back over to it. Maybe I can read it in chunks (which, for some reason, seems an oddly appropriate word to use.)

Had breakfast & coffee & books at BookWorks in Pacific Grove. I made a point of saying thank you to the owner for shelving Infinite Jest in the Classics section. He said it comes and goes frequently. I hope it comes and goes frequently at The Book Frog too, Becky.

On Himself's filmography footnote. I found it tiresome the first time through. But it is laden with clues. I don't have time to go find them all, but there's at least a dozen of Himself's movies that have been produced by amateur auteurs and many of them are worth finding on YouTube. Fiction becoming reality--part of the allure--the addiction--that is Infinite Jest. . . .

Random Thoughts (to be edited as the day's reading progresses)
5 August 2015

--"The light saddening outside, a grief felt in the bones, a sharpness to the edge of the lengthening shadows." (104)

--Okay. Pulled my handy copy of An Index to Gravity's Rainbow and found the Brockengespenst. Since I love the passage so much, here it is:

As the sunlight strikes their backs, coming in nearly flat on, it begins developing on the pearl cloudbank: two gigantic shadows, thrown miles overland, past Clausthal-Zelterfeld, past Seesen and Goslar, across where the river Leine would be, and reaching toward Weser...."By golly," Slothrop a bit nervous, "it's the Specter." You got it up around Greylock in the Berkshires too. Around these parts it is known as the Brockengespenst.

God-shadows. Slothrop raises an arm. His fingers are cities, his biceps is a province--of course he raises an arm. Isn't it expected of him? The arm-shadow trails rainbows behind as it moves reaching eastward for a grap at Gottingen. Not ordinary shadows, either--three-dimensional ones, cast out on the German dawn, yes, and Titans had to live in these mountains, or under them....Impossibly out of scale. Never to be carried by a river. Never to look to a horizon and think that it might go on forever. No trees to climb, no long journeys to take...only their deep images are left, haloed shells lying prone above the fogs men move in....

Geli kicks a leg out straight as a dancer, and tilts her head to the side. Slothrop raises his middle finger to the west, the headlong finger darkening three miles of cloud per second. Geli grabs for Slothrop's cock. Slothrop leans to bite Geli's tit. They are enormous, dancing the floor of the whole visible sky. He reaches underneath her dress. She twines a leg around one of his. The spectra wash red to indigo, tidal, immense, at all their edges. Under the clouds out there it's as still, and lost, as Atlantis.

But the Brockengespenstphanomen is confined to dawn's slender interface, and soon the shadows have come shrinking back to their owners. (Gravity's Rainbow, pp 330-331)

God that's a good book.

Random Thoughts (to be edited as the day's reading progresses)
6 August 2015

start: p 127 end: 154

--I've decided to add start and end pages each day. So that I can either be proud of or dismayed by my progress.

--I haven't read deeply into criticism of IJ, because I don't want to color my own interpretations (such as they are). I do, however, know that a big theme is addictions, both as they're perpetrated upon us and as we're complicit in them. I can't help but wonder, however, why of all the drugs to choose as the thread running through all the drug addiction (so far) portions of the story he chose marijuana. I mean, it's not really addictive, you can't actually overdose on it....I've known an awful lot of people who smoke an awful lot of dope and I've never known anybody hole themselves up for days on end doing nothing but smoking and eating Hostess cupcakes (or whatever). Is it, for some reason, because it's a mild drug? I'm baffled by this.

--Oh, yeah: devices. Home shopping and delivery. Panagoraphobia. Prescient.

--Better late than never to comment on O.N.A.N. Hilarious acronym. Pynchonesque, one could say, if one were so inclined...which one is.

19> DFW chafed at the Pynchon comparisons; I wish I had time to find some quotes (maybe when I'm back) but it's like, c'mon, Dave, he influenced you whether you intended him to influence you or not, and a lot more prominently in The Broom of the System, most notably with the names like Candy Mandible & Rick Vigorous. I think the influence in Infinite Jest is much less; though completely absent, no; just as William Gaddis' or even Charles Dickens' (if we're talking about peculiar, amusing names) influence is obvious as times in Pynchon's first novel V.. I get why writers don't like being compared, but Jesus there's a helluva lot worse things to suffer as a writer than being compared to the greatest living U.S. writer still working today, in Thomas Pynchon.

21> As you read further and come to discern the timeline of this novel (assuming you haven't grasped it already; I wouldn't be surprised if you had--I didn't, not completely, until Dave makes it easier on the reader around pg. 225 where he explicitly orders subsidized time) I wonder if you'll have a different, less baffled p.o.v. on the possibility of, if not outright marijuana addiction (I agree w/you on that), then maybe the possibility of a marijuana induced psychosis, after reconsidering "Year of Glad's" time-linear position in the novel?

Martin, this is new to me, thanks to Becky's comments: what do you think of the idea of Marijuana Psychosis as being an intentional twist or play off of Madame Psychosis / metempsychosis?

21> and Becky I hope you'll be dismayed by your progress each day so it will take you longer to finish and you'll have more posts and more things to say (and so you won't finish before me, even though I restarted on pg. 165 because I've read the first 225 pgs a gazillion times (but only the last 800 a couple.)

Regarding your question about the characters addicted to marijuana, it's not a physical addiction, but their crippling psychological and emotional dependence on it as a coping mechanism that he's trying to show. It's being used as a substitute for human connection and interaction in the same way The Entertainment and success in competitive tennis are. If it was something more powerful like heroin addiction, you'd be forced to focus on the physical need for it, but miss the more subtle reasons for why it was being used and its subsequent effects. His point being that anything can become a harmful addiction, and many things are used this way, to escape from or simply numb the pain and fear of actually being human.

I get that, actually. And because I've observed, and even experienced, people being sucked into video games and tv binge watching and the like, that works. But I almost feel like maybe inventing a drug would have worked better for me for this purpose. Obviously it's me, but I was distracted by thoughts of "that would never happen." I know, I know. I'm a reasonably sophisticated reader; sometimes I just get a bug up my ass about something.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Random Thoughts (to be edited as the day's reading progresses)
7 Auguest 2015

start: 155 end: 160

9:15 p.m. : Still reading. No notes for today.

--My only observation: IJ is not a book you can read between stuff.

Random Thoughts
8 August 2015

start: 160 end: 176

--No thoughts for the day except the usual: blinded by the brilliance and beauty of the prose, a little disheartened by how difficult the reading is (oh, to be young and unencumbered by the mundane quotidian thoughts that insinuate themselves in between the sentences), fascinated by the depths of DFW's Deep Thoughts™, tickled by the call-outs (conscious or not) to old man Pynchon.

Random Thoughts (to be edited as the day's reading progresses...one hopes)
9 August 2015

start: 176 end: 194

25> I understand your incredulity. Had the opening "Year of Glad" chapter been the very last pages of the novel, where the novel would have ended had Wallace ordered the pages chronologically, you'd of had time to get used to the idea, I'd wager, or perhaps at least the possibility of the idea, of Hal's incrementally increasing psychological dependence on pot (discussed by highthyme in post 24), after taking in over 1,000 pages of it.

Wallace must have known there would be incredulity (or misinterpretation, or whatever) by beginning the novel with the end of the novel (the end in terms of linear time), and yet did so anyway, and made the book more difficult to initially follow/fathom than it could've been otherwise. Why?

Why did he begin IJ w/ the end in "Year of Glad" then? I'm asking this mostly parenthetical question for myself (no response required) and am not so much interested in IJs structure, designed I hear out of fractals and all that discombobulating Sierpinski Triangle shit I can hear swooshing past my temporal lobe as I type this, as I am in better understanding the who what where when why and how of the plot and its convoluted content.

27> oh, to be young and unencumbered by the mundane quotidian thoughts that insinuate themselves in between the sentences

I commiserate with you.

Hamlet
Tilden on Spin
Good Morning Midnight
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
Giovanni's Room
Under the Volcano

Random Thoughts
10 August 2015

start: 194 end: 200

Not only did I make no progress yesterday, but I do have to interrupt my reading for a couple of days to read Go Set A Watchman for the store's book group.

Back in a few.

On the matter of marijuana addiction as a whole and psychosis/cognitive effects in particular, Wallace's description of Hal's habit is such a perfect reflection of four or five friends of mine (almost all, weirdly, former roommates--I'm only an occasional pot smoker, certainly less than 100 times in my life, so I don't know what it is about me that makes me such an agreeable housemate for serious weedheads). I think what all of them have in common is energy and focus bordering on obsessiveness; or, compulsion? Not "driving passion" obsessiveness, but just getting REALLY INTO something and doing it for hours at a time. A couple of them are really high-performing in their fields, which in different ways reward having no separation between public and private life (one is a humanities academic--he'd go out and get a loaf of bread and block of cheese and a tub of olives and a bottle of vermouth, which at least in our neighbourhood was the best pound-for-penny way to get drunk, and a bag of weed and a stack of books and I'd find him every time I came home for the next three days, sprawled out in different attitudes, super high and reading and pounding away on his laptop; on the other hand, one is an anti-corporate activist who manages petitions and "actions" and so on from his computer and jets around to protests and doesn't get high for work but lives this frenetic life and when he has a couple of days off he seems to spend them just on the couch in a pot stupor, with occasional breaks to eat greasy food and bet on basketball; two are programmers who like to smoke weed and program, as programmers will). But they're not necessarily worldbeaters, just always on the go--another one is a plumber who will rattle off in this peculiar meticulous way all his projects every time you see him, bands he's playing in, DIY, mascotting (for the local hockey team)/clowning (kids' birthdays, etc.).

Also, with one exception, they're all very fit (two were pretty serious amateur athletes, the others just have I guess what you'd call this crazy intrinsic vitality--all reflexes and wiriness). And again with one exception, they're all very sincere people who like to talk about their feelings, to feel understood and like they understand you--and now that I think of it, they all have unusually complicated relationships with their overbearing mothers!

I mean, you can see the ways this profile fits Hal and probably DFW, but what I want to say more broadly is that it seems like of all the various reasons one might self-medicate these guys aren't in it for pain-ease per se, or escape or pleasure and/or performance enhancement or to fill that need or even oblivion: they're in it for regulation. They're people whose natural way is to think and think and think and think or do and do and do and do, and weed gives them some endocrinologically enforced downtime but also smooths out the jitters and jumps so they can get back to work. They're all not only pot smokers but people particularly into the rituals of pot--different strains, different methods of consumption, trading intelligences on same, rolling a joint with two fingers, &c.--the plumber, who is also a drummer, basically derives the rhythm of his day from weed in a way that is probably familiar to some cigarette smokers: get up, smoke a joint; have breakfast, smoke a joint; get to work, smoke a joint; etc.

So I guess what I mean to say is that not only does pot addiction suit a personality type, but also, and Wallace was prescient here, it suits our present times, where everyone's freelance or "precariat" or "union-excluded management" or a "personal real estate corporation" or selling themselves or just wound up tight and doesn't know how to slow down but still needs to be on Skype at 5 AM to listen in on a meeting on the East Coast. For people who are prevented by conditions or constitution from relaxing, it seems a better option than the three-martini lunch and less sinister than tranquilizers (though don't they make their share of appearances in IJ as well? Can't quite remember now), a kind of change of state that must, I can only imagine, give some people a chance to feel like their world is small and cozy and they are truly themselves, for themselves, for now. I think this also echoes the way Wallace describes the effects of the Entertainment, a bit? Except it's just a taste, and you can eat a Hostess cupcake and come back.

(And in that sense, Enrique, perhaps this is an oblique and partial answer to your "metempsychosis" remark, which seems so obvious now that you say it and given the kind of, what, Lethean loved one/muse/madonna/martyr role she plays, and her dual identity, and I am wary of spoilering here, but I will read with this in mind! Hey, I had in my head that the appropriate time to read this again would be the next time my life fell apart, which isn't qute yet, but now I'm getting kind of excited!)

What an exciting post, Martin. You really see the people in your life. Being into pot for regulation--as a non-pothead myself (couple times I tried it 25-plus years ago it made me wildly, freakishly paranoid, talk about psychosis!)--makes a hell of a lot of sense, and does indeed fit Hal's E.T.A. reality.

It makes me overexplain, laugh at stuff no one else thinks is funny and, if I have too much, eat myself sick.

I'd forgotten something important about the writing of David Foster Wallace since his suicide on Sept. 12, 2008 (seven-year anniversary less than a month away, hard to believe it's been almost a decade since he died); namely, how funny it oftentimes is. Those who put down Infinite Jest early will never see the humorous side of DFW (unless they read his essays or debut novel The Broom of the System) and that's a minor shame.

I was reminded of his humor today while reading IJ on my lunch break, and I recommend; no, encourage if not INSIST, that those of you who've understandably set the Infinite Jest down early on because early on it can be damn difficult going, granted, that you give it, the Infinite Jest, one more chance and immediately DROP RIGHT NOW WHATEVER IT IS YOU'RE DOING, and turn to page 176, in which begins the chapter "SELECTED TRANSCRIPTS OF THE RESIDENT-INTERFACE-DROP-IN-HOURS OF MS. PATRICIA MONTESIAN, M.A., C.S.A.C., EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL RECOVERY HOUSE (SIC), ENFIELD MA, 1300-1500H, WEDNESDAY, 4 NOVEMBER -- YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT," because I laughed so hard in my car parked in the shade at a park while reading this chapter that passersby stopped in the process of walking their dogs to stare incredulously at me, like I was a fucken freak or something.

DWFs suicide cast a dark shade over his writing for me, and that biography from three years ago by D.T. Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, only darkened the already dark shades, darkened them to the point that I saw little point in bothering with David Foster Wallace again, but no matter how dark it got for DFW (and it doesn't get much darker than suicide) he was still the funniest guy I ever met on the page. Which only makes his suicide that much more dark and tragic to contemplate, so let's not go there momentarily, okay? Wallace was Funny and Crass. He was simultaneously Funny, Crass and Erudite. Is there a word for that, being simultaneously Funny, Crass and Erudite? There should be, and DFWs mug or grill or piehole or whatever other slang term you'd care to call that iconic visage of his unshaven profile, should be pictured with the entry of the word in the O.E.D. Read pgs. 176-181 of Infinite Jest and just try convincing me otherwise. . . .

>35 absurdeist: i've not read The Broom of the System, but I think IJ is plenty funny. It took time to "get it" for me: some of the dark "humour" in the early parts (off the top of my head, there's the bit about the family in Fresno who get poisoned) comes across like sniggering in this self-satisfied prurient way, collective-cloaca stuff like certain phenomena that will remain unnamed but that we all know from the internet nowadays, that helped me understand what this article, http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/08/david-foster-wallace-beloved-author-of-bros.html, which I basically execrate but does capture a take on Wallace that I think he didn't really rein himself in enough to protect himself from, is talking about. A few bits that may go for "dark" and do have to be granted allowance for coming from what is now already a different era, but which seem to end up sort of straightforwardly proving that there is still a place for those banal and closed-minded adjectives, "sick" and "twisted."

Oh! And crass! Some crass I get, Rabelais's crass, say, I get, but DFW's crass I don't like as crass and it was only after I got that he was doing something a lot more subtle with those parts and the very different, slow-burn absurdism of parts like Eschaton and a lot of the Ennet House stuff started happening that I got how he was funny. Funny and bleeding-heart (a positive in my book) go hand in hand in IJ.